Confronting Captivity: Britain and the United States and Their POWs in Nazi Germany

Conclusion

conclusion Barely one month into the war British intelligence had warned: ‘‘It appears very probable that the Germans will fight this war on no rules whatsoever , and that our conceptions of the treatment of prisoners of war will have to be entirely revised. It is even possible that certain Prisoners of War camps in Germany will be in the hands of the Gestapo, in which case no human feelings on the part of the camp staff are to be expected and discipline will be enforced by sheer brutality.’’∞ With hindsight the assessment appears realistic enough—it certainly proved true for the 3.25 million Soviet pows who perished in German captivity. And it is undeniable that the war was fought on very different rules than any previous war. Both World War I and World War II were total wars in which millions of troops were wiped out on the battlefield. What made World War II different was the indiscriminate death it brought to countless masses of ordinary civilians. But the truly unprecedented horror of World War II lies, of course, in the way the Nazis harnessed their racist ideology to modern technology and so achieved the systematic murder of millions of innocent human beings, notably Jews. In this book I have sought to analyze how it could happen that almost all the 300,000 British and American troops who in the course of World War II fell into German hands survived captivity in Nazi pow camps and were repatriated almost as soon as the war had ended. My point of departure and main interest thereby has been to trace and assess the policies and actions the British and American governments took—but also failed to take—on behalf of their pows in Germany. In the racial ideology of the Nazis, both the British and the American peoples were, of course, inferior to the Aryan German Volk but as Anglo-Saxons nevertheless ranked high in the hierarchy of races. Already in Mein Kampf Hitler had written: ‘‘The Germanic inhabitant of the American continent, who has remained racially pure and unmixed, rose to be the master of the continent.’’≤ It was true that both Western countries and Germany were now pitted against each other as bitter enemies, but the Nazis’ Vernichtungskrieg (war of annihilation) was directed against the Soviet Union, not the West. This was part of the reason why, where British and U.S. prisoners of war conclusion 281 were concerned, Berlin adhered throughout the war to the 1929 Geneva Convention on the treatment of pows. The contrast with the Soviet troops the Nazis captured could not be starker: these were Untermenschen (subhumans ) who did not deserve to live in the first place. Moreover, fair treatment of Western pows meant the Germans could count on reciprocity by Britain and the United States vis-à-vis their own troops imprisoned in the West. Reciprocity first emerged as a main principle between the two sides during the shackling crisis. This crisis started out, in the fall of 1942, as an attempt by Berlin to force London to put a halt to British commando raids on German positions—German troops abducted in this way for intelligence purposes had their hands tied behind their back. Because London refused to give in, 4,000 pows, most of them Canadians, spent more than a year in manacles. Remarkably, whenever the War Cabinet debated what steps to take during the crisis—at one point it partially relented because of domestic pressure and opposition by the Dominion governments—its members never broached the overall pow problem. What is more, it is doubtful that the hardship their policy inevitably entailed for the pows themselves ever played much of a role. This was, of course, partly because even in captivity these men remained soldiers and thus were duty-bound to fight and die for their country. But, no less significant, there was also the recognition that more than three years into the war—and in contrast to the extreme situation in the Far East—no immediate threat existed to the lives and health of British Commonwealth and U.S. troops held in German pow camps. To a great extent, this was what mattered most to policy makers in London and Washington. The assessment, which surfaced soon after Dunkirk, would form the basis for their decisions regarding the pows almost unvaryingly until D-Day. At the same time, the attitude did little to assuage the anxieties of the families and friends...